Mark Cerny Explains Game Caching/Installs

Call it installation or call it caching, but the bottom line is that you will have to save large chunks of PlayStation 4 games to the system's hard drive. It's not an option. It's mandatory on Sony's next-gen system. Today, at a stylish waterfront hotel in New York City that's been taken over by Sony for all things PS4, the system's lead architect, Mark Cerny, explained just how these requirements work.

If you are playing a disc-based game, the system will begin caching the disc when you put it in the console and get ready to play. The game is saving part of itself to the system's hard drive. The amount of data that has to be saved before you can start will vary per title.

Cerny said that for the launch game he directed, Knack, users should only have to wait 10s of seconds to play the game. After that, as you play, the game will stream more content to the console's 500GB hard drive. Knack will use 37GB of space overall, as noted on the game's box. Obviously, it won't take many games to fill the console's hard drive.http://kotaku.com/how-mandatory-game...ps4-1462283797

Disappointing that its mandatory but we still don't know if the next game I put in will overwrite that space taken by the previous one will will it cache/install in a new chunk of space

I wonder when a nuclear warhead goes off, does the frame rate of real life drop?

I just tweeted Cerny and Shu to clarify. Fingers crossed 1 of them answers.

edit:
Seems we do know, Ixion attempted to post this as well, theres more to the article than you have posted.

copy/paste from Ixion's thread that was closed due to this one being open first.

Call it installation or call it caching, but the bottom line is that you will have to save large chunks of PlayStation 4 games to the system's hard drive. It's not an option. It's mandatory on Sony's next-gen system. Today, at a stylish waterfront hotel in New York City that's been taken over by Sony for all things PS4, the system's lead architect, Mark Cerny, explained just how these requirements work.

If you are playing a disc-based game, the system will begin caching the disc when you put it in the console and get ready to play. The game is saving part of itself to the system's hard drive. The amount of data that has to be saved before you can start will vary per title.

Cerny said that for the launch game he directed, Knack, users should only have to wait 10s of seconds to play the game. After that, as you play, the game will stream more content to the console's 500GB hard drive. Knack will use 37GB of space overall, as noted on the game's box. Obviously, it won't take many games to fill the console's hard drive.

Cached/installed game data will stay on the hard drive until the user deletes it. Cerny said that there had been some internal discussions at Sony about having the PS4 auto-delete installed data from games that players hadn't used in a while. They decided against it, figuring that gamers would never want to feel "blindsided" and would prefer to make their data management decisions manually. Probably a good choice!

The disc installation is required on PS4 because the console is not designed to read games off of discs. It's not a PlayStation issue. It's a physics issue. The machine may have a Blu-Ray drive that's about three times faster than the PS3 with about six times as much memory, but it's still more expedient for it to read data from its own hard drive. Cerny said his team had heard too many complaints from current-gen developers about having to wait to load in new levels of games. Putting the data on the readily-accessible hard drive alleviates that.

With 50GB the norm for next gen games, the internal HDD will fill up quick. But itīs good that Sony let the Players decide what they want to delete and what not. Sure they could have use some form of caching but i prefer to have full control over my HDD capacity.

I'm crossing my fingers that a future FW update gives the ability to use external storage. I don't play nearly as much as some of the people here, and I'm concerned about filling up 500gb really quickly.

Disappointing that its mandatory but we still don't know if the next game I put in will overwrite that space taken by the previous one will will it cache/install in a new chunk of space

Kind of a strange way to put it. On the PC, it isn't mandatory to install, you can choose to not play the game. The PC game reserves hard drive space for itself when it installs. The PS4 isn't installing here, but reserving an equivalent amount of space to a full install. What this shows is how much content there is in these next-gen games. It really can't come off a optical drive fast enough and the hard drive data rate is still so much faster. On the PS4, the game will still be on the BDROM and using the reserved hard drive space as a giant buffer. On a PC, if you install and uninstall a bunch of games, the drive gets really fragmented. Whatever the game OS that Sony uses, it tends to not fragment the drive as much, with defrag housekeeping built-in which is a characteristic of Linux. There must be some dynamic allocation or overwrite planned. With a 500GB standard hard drive and almost every game so far needing almost 50GB, simple arithmetic shows if there isn't dynamic allocation, then you could only have 10 games at a time on the hard drive. The difference between installing and caching is that caching is mostly empty reserved space, the game content is being streamed into it, so allocating and reallocating the space won't write over program data.

Pacing in wait of Sony's imminent DOOM!...since 2006

PS4 - The Only Hardcore Gaming Console = All Your Baserape Are Belong To Us

Blimey. Not good to be honest. Let's say 5-7 games, plus DLC and game saves - boom. You're done (same on the Bone as well).

I don't buy their decision either to 'let the gamer choose'. Lazy $#@!ers. They could have had a setting where you could choose one of three options: Delete oldest first, Delete games not played for x months, Always ask

That would have given each individual gamer the choice to decide whether they want to $#@! around being a PS4 console administrator, or have it do it for you based on some basic criteria.

Blimey. Not good to be honest. Let's say 5-7 games, plus DLC and game saves - boom. You're done (same on the Bone as well).

I don't buy their decision either to 'let the gamer choose'. Lazy $#@!ers. They could have had a setting where you could choose one of three options: Delete oldest first, Delete games not played for x months, Always ask

That would have given each individual gamer the choice to decide whether they want to $#@! around being a PS4 console administrator, or have it do it for you based on some basic criteria.

"Cached/installed game data will stay on the hard drive until the user deletes it. Cerny said that there had been some internal discussions at Sony about having the PS4 auto-delete installed data from games that players hadn't used in a while. They decided against it"

I wonder when a nuclear warhead goes off, does the frame rate of real life drop?

"Cached/installed game data will stay on the hard drive until the user deletes it. Cerny said that there had been some internal discussions at Sony about having the PS4 auto-delete installed data from games that players hadn't used in a while. They decided against it"

Yeah I read that. Seems like it was too much hassle to implement some housekeeping options in the menu and that's his way of trying to sell the 'solution'. I don't want to $#@! around finding space, I want to set some basic criteria (like I do on my TiVO box) and have it manage the space. I turn my console on for gaming, not to do some admin.

In the end, I'm not going to be dealing with bandwidth caps. I can install, delete and install again from a disc game without fear of getting a call from my ISP.

Some months get crazy, look at March. March is almost always bloated with games. This past march had TombRaider, Bioshock Infinite, GoW:Ascension and GoW:Judgement....I could be missing something else.

That's a bit of let down, but it's not an issue for me really. I've been managing disk space on my 40GB PS3 for a long time, and with the PlayGo system that lets you play as it installs it ain't going to be an issue if you've an older game you ever want to go back to after deleting the data..